silk road

The US Marshals Service is selling another chunk of Silk Road bitcoins. The 44,341 BTC, to be sold in blocks of 2,000 bitcoin, will go on sale from 12:00 UTC to 18:00 UTC on November 5, 2015.
These are the final bitcoins taken from Ross Ulbricht, alleged mastermind of the Silk Road.
The coins are worth about $10.6 million in total. The US Marshals wrote:
￼”The registration period… Read More

U.S. Secret Service special agent Shaun W. Bridges of Laurel, Maryland, pleaded guilty today before the U.S. District Judge Richard Seeborg of the Northern District of California to obstruction and money laundering that occurred during the Silk Road case. He will be sentenced on December 7, 2015.
“Mr. Bridges has now admitted that he brazenly stole $820,000 worth of digital currency… Read More

The alleged mastermind of the Silk Road, Ross Ulbricht, has sent his first note from prison, a handwritten missive posted on FreeRoss.org, a site dedicated to news about the Ulbricht’s case and fundraising for his legal costs.
The letter was sent to the attendees of PorcFest or Porcupine Fest, a “free state” festival focused on cryptocurrencies, alternative viewpoints… Read More

The alleged owner of the Silk Road, an online black market, has been sentenced to life in prison by Judge Katherine B. Forrest in a Federal District Court in Manhattan. He was found guilty on seven charges, including engaging in a continuing criminal enterprise, narcotics conspiracy and money laundering. Read More

If that headline doesn’t make much sense, welcome to the 21st century when a program designed to automatically buy random items from illegal marketplaces can be arrested by Swiss police. As you’ll recall, Swiss police seized a program called Darknet Shopper, a bot that visited darknet markets and bought random items with bitcoin. Most of the items were mundane – counterfeit… Read More

Ross Ulbricht, the creator of the Silk Road online black marketplace, is facing a number of Federal charges related to allegations that he facilitated the illegal activity of marketplace users. Week one of the trial ended with the Defense’s cross examination of the State’s first witness, the undercover agent who infiltrated the Silk Road. Read More

If you read the headline above and said “Huh?” then you are not alone. It seems Ross Ulbricht, the alleged head of Silk Road, was not the real owner of the site. According to Ulbricht’s attorney, the creator was one Mark Karpeles, the disgraced head of Mt. Gox, an exchange that imploded theatrically in February.
Motherboard has a reporter at the trail who noted that… Read More

The U.S. Marshals Service has completed the second auction of bitcoin seized from the original Silk Road. The auction, consisting of 50,000 BTC, is the latest in a seized BTC sell-off that began in June. Read More

While the FBI was able to take down a number of popular Dark Web sites including the Silk Road 2, it seems the wide-ranging attacks targeted mostly fake sites.
Friend of TC Nik Cubrilovic has taken a closer look at the sites the FBI attacked and found that 153 of the 276 them were spam sites or clones.
“Of the 153 clone or scam sites, 133 were clones and 20 were scam or phishing… Read More

Latest Crunch Report

The UK National Crime Agency has posted a notice describing a series of six arrests that coincided with the takedown of the Silk Road 2.0. Authorities have also taken down two other dark markets, Hydra and Cloud 9, both hidden on the TOR network.
￼The six people arrested on suspicion of being concerned in the supply of controlled drugs were a 20-year-old man from Liverpool city centre, a… Read More

The alleged operator of the Silk Road 2.0, Blake Benthall, has been arrested by the FBI in San Francisco after federal agents shut down the site on Wednesday. The site was a copy of the original Silk Road, a secure black market site allegedly run by Ross Ulbricht.
The FBI announced the arrest on its New York Twitter feed. Read More

According to a court document released today, expert witness Joshua J. Horowitz, a lawyer and tech expert, believes the FBI is not telling the whole truth when it comes to how they found the back-end server owned by the alleged Silk Road mastermind Ross Ulbricht.
In the document, reproduced below, Horowitz says that his “practice is concentrated on criminal defense matters that… Read More

You may have heard that the infamous Dread Pirate Robets AKA Ross Ulbricht’s Silk Road was taken down thanks to a problem in his anonymous Tor server. Now, however, Brian Krebs has shown us just how the Feds found Ulbricht’s server and, additionally, the pirate himself.
A hole in the Silk Road’s anonymity appeared because of a leaky CAPTCHA prompt. CAPTCHA, as we all well… Read More

The US Marshals announced they have sold 30,000 BTC to an anonymous bidder. The auction took place on June 27 and the highest bidder won all 30 blocks of 1,000 bitcoins. Comically, the sender of a an email to those involved in the auction disclosed all the bidders last week, making it clear that a number of big players, including Barry Silbert of SecondMarket and Bitcoin Investment Trust… Read More

Dropped, as Yoda would say, the other shoe has. U.S. Marshals are now selling off 29,656.51306529 BTC, about $18 million in bitcoin at today’s $600 price. The sale announcement drove prices down for a brief period overnight moving the needle down from $620 to $608. Read More

As I noted in January, the U.S. government is quite interested in getting out of the Bitcoin business and has, thus far, been working hard to convert seized bitcoin to actual cash, a move that could affect the BTC markets if these large transactions happen
For example, this press release by the Department of Justice outlines how they caught alleged Silk Road user Conrnelis Jan Slomp in Miami… Read More

Ross Ulbricht AKA the Dread Pirate Roberts of Silk Road fame is now facing a “kingpin” charge which carries with it a 20-year minimum sentence. By claiming that Ulbricht was part of a continuing criminal enterprise (the “kingpin statute”), the Feds have essentially handed Ulbricht a minimum 20 year sentence for his involvement in the marketplace. Read More

The Silk Road moderator Gary Davis, aka Libertas, is officially free on bail and awaiting an extradition hearing on February 13. Irish and U.S. authorities arrested Davis on December 20 in an international operation that also nabbed Silk Road moderators Andrew Jones, aka Inigo, and Peter Phillip Nash, aka SameSameButDifferent. Read More

The Silk Road 2, a hidden website modeled on the original Silk Road contraband marketplace, is regrouping as the users and single remaining moderator prepare for a Christmas lockdown. The group faced a setback on Friday when US and Irish authorities arrested moderators Andrew Michael Jones, Gary Davis, and Peter Philip Nash. A final moderator, Cirrus, remains on the site. The arrests happened… Read More